Tuesday, 10 April 2012

I had a solar geyser installed in July last year, and looked forward to its paying for itself over about
3 years, according to the figures provided to me. I’ve had many enquiries about
solar heating since, so I did a few quick sums to work out exactly how much the
solar system is saving me in electricity bills each month.

My average electricity
bill from January to July last year (seven months, including two winter months)
was R565.

My average electricity
bill from August last year to February this year (also seven months, and also
including two winter months) was R400.

That’s a
saving of R165 per month or about 30%.

The cost of the system, less a
rebate from Eskom (which was only paid in December, 5 months after installation
and all the paperwork had been submitted, and after repeated enquiries), came
to about R10 000.

So at the moment it
seems that the real payback time is about 60 months or 5 years.

It’s probably worth
mentioning (and can be seen by my average bills) that we as a household use
very little electricity – we don’t have power-hungry appliances like heaters,
air-conditioners or tumble-dryers – and I’d think that in a home where the
general electricity consumption is higher and there’s more hot-water demand, the
savings would be more marked.

Also, because of the
vagaries of the weather in the Western Cape (with both summers and winters
varying in their degrees of harshness), a more accurate reflection of any
savings would be the average electricity consumption of the full year before
installation (July 2010 to July 2011) and after (August 2011 to August 2012).